UC Santa Barbara UC Santa Barbara Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Making Local: The Politics of Place in Anglo-Norman Hagiography Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/65f028j7 Author Hopkins, Shay M. Publication Date 2017 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara Making Local: The Politics of Place in Anglo-Norman Hagiography A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in English by Shay Murray Hopkins Committee in charge: Professor Heather Blurton, Chair Professor L.O. Aranye Fradenburg Joy Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh September 2017 The dissertation of Shay Murray Hopkins is approved. ______________________________________________________________________ Professor L.O. Aranye Fradenburg Joy ______________________________________________________________________ Bishnupriya Ghosh _______________________________________________________________________ Heather Blurton, Dissertation Chair September 2017 Making Local: The Politics of Place in Anglo-Norman Hagiography Copyright © 2017 by Shay Hopkins iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This project is indebted to the many committee members, faculty, staff, and family friends whose persistent support sustained me and enabled me to complete this dissertation. I wish to state my sincere gratitude to my supervisor and dissertation chair, Professor Heather Blurton. Professor Blurton provided continuous support and feedback throughout this project as well as an attentive, critical eye that challenged my ideas in ways that allowed me grow as a scholar and writer. Through her own work, Professor Blurton also modeled a practice of research and scholarship to which I aspire. Without Professor Blurton’s encouragement, energy, and sense of humor, this project would not have been possible and for that I am grateful. I also want to express my thanks to my dissertation committee members Professor L.O. Aranye Fradenburg Joy and Professor Bishnupriya Ghosh. My committee members helped shape the contours of this project and provided invaluable guidance throughout. I also wish to extend my appreciation to the faculty and staff of the University of California at Santa Barbara’s (UCSB) English Department who offered me encouragement throughout all stages of this project. I am especially appreciative of my medieval studies cohort who offered camaraderie and comedy at all phases of this project. I would also like to thank UCSB’s English Department and Graduate Division for providing a variety of form of financial support and resources that facilitated the completion of this project. And, finally, I am indebted to my family and close friends whose encouragement made this process worthwhile. iv VITA OF SHAY HOPKINS September 2017 EDUCATION Doctoral Candidate, Department of English, University of Santa Barbara, California PhD emphasis in Medieval Studies (expected September 2017) M.A., English Literature, University of California, Santa Barbara, June 2012 Fields of Specialization: Medieval, Literature and the Mind, General Theory B.A., English with Departmental Honors, Seattle University, 2009 PUBLICATIONS Archive of Early Middle English (AEME), Contributing XML Editor, 2014-present, online publication in progress. Review of The Anglo-Norman Lay of Havelok. Eds. and Trans. Glyn S. Burgess and Leslie C. Brook. Gallica 37. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2015. Co-Author. Forthcoming in Arthuriana. Review of How to Make a Human: Animals and Violence in the Middle Ages by Karl Steel. Comitatus 43 (2012). 286-288. GRANTS and AWARDS Graduate Division Dissertation Fellowship, University of California at Santa Barbara, Fall 2016. Donald Howard Travel Award, New Chaucer Society, July 2016. Vercelli Book and Anglo-Saxon Studies Grant, Fondazione Museo del Tesoro del Duomo e Archivio Capitolare. Vercelli, Italy, Summer 2013. CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS ‘The Danish Connection: Havelok the Dane’s Multicultural Inheritance.” Making Early Middle English, Victoria, B.C., Canada, September 2016. “Encoding Wayfinding Techniques in the Hagiographies of Oxford, Bodleian Library, Laud Misc. 108.” The New Chaucer Society, London, England, July 2016 “ ‘Ne sai ki sui’: Speculative History and the Havelok Legend.” The International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 2015. The Humanities and Technology: Diving into the Digital Humanities, DHSoCal THATCamp, San Diego State University, October 2014 “Sanctifying the Secular: The Hagiographic Politics of Havelock" PAMLA, University of California at Riverside, October 2014. “Sovereign Identity in Guillaume D’Angleterre,” The Medieval Association of the Pacific, University of San Diego, March 2013. TEACHING AND RESEARCH INTERESTS Old English, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English Literatures, hagiography, manuscript studies, the digital humanities. v TEACHING EXPERIENCE, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, SANTA BARBARA WRITING PROGRAM TEACHING ASSISTANT Instructor of Record with responsibilities including syllabus design, lectures, facilitation of class discussion, creating all exams and writing assignments, grading student work, two office hours per week, as well as other scheduled student meetings. Writing 2: Academic Writing,: Fall 2014 through Spring 2017. TEACHING ASSOCIATE Responsibilities include: syllabus design, lectures, facilitation of class discussion, creating all exams and writing assignments, grading student work, two office hours per week, as well as other scheduled student meetings Writing 2: Academic Writing, Summer 2015, Summer 2016 English 15: Introduction to Shakespeare, Summer 2014 English 10: Introduction to Literary Studies, Summer 2012, Summer 2013 ENGLISH TEACHING ASSISTANT Responsibilities include: weekly facilitation of two discussion sections, guest lecturing, grading student papers and exams, attending weekly course meetings with instructor, holding two office hours per week as well as other scheduled student meetings English 101: English Literature from the Medieval Period to 1650, Fall 2010, Fall 2011, Spring 2013, Spring 2014. English 15: Introduction to Shakespeare, Spring 2012, Fall 2013 English 105A: Early Shakespeare, Winter 2013, Winter 2014 English 10: Introduction to Literary Studies, Winter 2012, Fall 2012 SERVICE Co-organizer of UCSB’s annual Medieval Studies Graduate Student Conference 2014: Movement and Mobility in the Middle Ages. May 31, 2014. Co-chair, 2013 UCSB English Department Committee of Graduate Students RESEARCH EXPERIENCE Research Assistant and Editor to Professor Carol Pasternack: performed research on sex and religious identity in Old English texts. Summer 2012, Summer 2015 Transcriber for UCSB’s English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), Transcribed black letter from digital copies of popular ballads from Early Modern England. Edited digital images of Early Modern woodcuts for the digital archive. Summer 2013, Summer 2015 Research Assistant to Professor Heather Blurton: worked on an Instructional Development Grant geared toward integrating media and technology into the course English 197: Old English Poetry: Viking Poetry 2011-2012 LANGUAGES Old English, Middle English, Latin, French. vi ABSTRACT Making Local: The Politics of Place in Anglo-Norman Hagiography by Shay Hopkins This dissertation considers the category of the local in Anglo-Norman hagiography. More specifically, this project asks how a consideration of local space informs our knowledge of ideologies of power in twelfth-century England? In considering this question, I attend to representations of power and space in an archive of saints’ lives and secular hagiography that have strong connections to local, intranational places. Such a consideration of the local complicates the established discourses of power and identity in the High Middle Ages. When discussing the use of space in hagiography, I employ the term local to refer to a category that includes but also extends beyond the physical, geometrical boundaries of a given area. The local encompasses the sum of a place’s culture, community, practices, and ideological investments. In this way, the local is dynamic and relational category where geographical space and socio-cultural ideologies of power intersect. Further, my use of the term local is yoked to larger methodological discourses on the nation in postcolonial studies. In this project, I use this term to reflect recent shifts in postcolonial theory and build on how medieval studies addresses prenational identities. I am indebted to previous scholars whose work has cleared the way for my use of the category of the local, as the past two decades have witnessed a dramatic shift in how academia views medievalist studies’ use of postcolonial theory. My project’s attention to the dynamics of space and collective identities in postcolonial studies is timely and participates in what I see to be a third generation of vii postcolonial medievalist scholarship. This third generation of postcolonial medieval scholarship moves from a theorization of the nation to the theorization of the local. This dissertation also stresses the primacy of hagiography in theorizing the category of the local in Medieval Studies. As a genre, saints’ lives have very intimate relationships with space. The site-specific location of an English saint’s birth, deeds, and his or her bodily remains are key features of these texts and important knowledge for their devotional communities. Hagiography’s relationship between the regional